


Road Movie to Berlin.

by OldEnoughToKnowBetter



Category: New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, F/M, Multi, New York City, Other, Polyamory, X-Men References
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2020-01-06 20:40:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18395951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldEnoughToKnowBetter/pseuds/OldEnoughToKnowBetter
Summary: Early summer, sometime in the Oughts, sometime in their 30s, in another universe. A universe where artists can draw feet really well.Disclaimer: Logan, the New Mutants, and the X-Men belong to Marvel Comics. I'm not writing this story for profit, merely to tell it.





	1. Third week in the Chelsea

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [I See Myself In Your Eyes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2670329) by [OriginalCeenote](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OriginalCeenote/pseuds/OriginalCeenote). 



Rahne's fur tastes like ozone, and melts like sugar on her tongue. If Rahne accidentally starts to transition to full wolf while they're making love - and it's happened- and reverts to human, the fur turns to dust on the bed. It's really, really weird. But Dani is used to it.

 

After so many years, they have old married couple sex. Smiling at each other as they yank off their clothes, opening the drawer for favorite toys, going for the foolproof moves. Rahne is as responsive as ever, as volatile, and she still bites like hell. Dani has never tired of her pale skin, her full breasts, her scruff of red hair. She rubs her hand over that short red hair as Rahne licks her, and they slide into rapport for a few seconds.

When they're psychically connected, Dani can come in less than a minute, the feedback pulling them along together. Sometimes they unlink just to slow it down, to take their time, to be able to surprise each other. This Saturday night after an endless day of classes is one of those times, Dani's long tanned legs over Rahne's small, strong white shoulders. Rahne is one of those rare redheaded people who doesn't freckle, maybe because she isn't exactly a redhead or exactly a people.

As if to demonstrate that, Rahne triggers her shift and the fur breaks like a wave over her back. Her arms lengthen, the mass drawn from her round butt - even rounder at thirty than it was at fifteen!- and she curves her fingers to protect Dani from the claws that emerge. She has to use her (hairy) knuckles to part Dani's labia, but the half-wolf form has an amazing tongue, and unbelievable senses. With their rapport in abeyance, Rahne can use her wolf-sensorium instead, to parse Dani's arousal with shattering precision. Teasing and edging is an outlet for Rahne's aggro streak, the fine line of simmering irritability that is so different from Dani's bursts of wrath.

Of course, Dani used to feel weird about it. About the wolf-girl crouching over her, lapping and sniffing, her tail tickling Dani's ankles. And Rahne never learned to talk very clearly in her halfway form, so that's gotta seem a little strange to anybody watching. Not that anybody has watched them, since Sam took off and got married to that uptight Russian speedster from the UK group.

Those were the good days, their teens, those sweet nights after a bad battle or a hard workout or a dark turn in the political climate. The three of them in bed, Sam stroking her braids, winding one around his cock and the other between Rahney's legs. His rough voice and his rawboned body, both in service of their pleasure. Lila didn't mind; Lila never minded anything, until Sam put her second. And Dani did love to see Rahne with a boy, but they've been so careful since a close call with a townie who was eighteen, after all, thank the Lord.

They both miss Sam. They're too close without him to dilute their intensity. They flare up at each other and get bored of each other's bad habits. They eat the same thing for dinner for two weeks because they can't agree on anything else. They miss his terrible music. Dani, if she's honest, finds it hard work to satisfy Rahne sometimes. Rahne has animal appetites. Dani likes sex gentle more often than not and enjoys a good fight, while Rahne likes rough sex but hates shouting arguments.

Sam used to give Rahney the bruising she likes, his long legs framing her curves, jackhammering her into the bed while Dani sat cross-legged on the floor, doing bong-hits, smiling at their happiness. He loved to pet Dani, too, to stroke her hair and rub her feet and work the knots out of her shoulders. Oldest sib, caretaker, while Rahne and Dani were both brittle onlies. He married the blonde speedster and joined that team in London because Moira said he couldn't have kids with Rahne _or_ Dani.

Something ordinary and human in the end, about Dani's Rh factors, Rahne's recessives. Or maybe it was the other way around. In the years of miscarriages and terminations and dashed hopes, as their community got older and learned the ways their unusual dna chains couldn't link up, it all blurred together. Nowadays they have a website, a database, an AI mutant genetics matchmaker, so no-one has to look at the ultrasound and make a terrible decision. Nobody talks about "viability" anymore.

Dani never understood why the baby had to be *their* genetic material. She's always felt that her dna legacy was problematic, that she wouldn't wish any permutation of her powers on anyone, or her big feet. And pregnancy seemed tedious and unnecessary, surely there was a Sh'iar incubator in the basement or something. Rahne wanted a baby so much, though, and she wanted to be pregnant, even if she couldn't shift for nine months. Moira wanted a grandbaby almost as badly.

There was a morning when Rahne threw up, and days when they were all so happy, and the first time they saw their baby's little peanut shape. There was bed rest, and then Moira said not this time. Something not right. She took care of it. They stood in the Xavier cemetery, the three of them, holding hands.

There were tests and nano-something recombinant manipulations and embryo implantations and a pre-dawn hour with rain pouring down outside. The bed was full of blood. Sam was crying so hard he broke a blood vessel in his nose, and then there was more blood. Rahne had her arms wrapped around her belly, and then she shifted and she was gone, running for the woods in the rain. Dani rode after her, the cordite smell of Sam's blast the trail she followed, and they found her by the lake. Rahne was woman-bodied again, naked, soaking and freezing, and they all three clung together crying as the sun came up. Brightwind nuzzled them gently. It was as bad as some of the worst battles, as bad as the times Dani's power hurt someone she loved.

 

After that they tried with Dani. She liked having sex with Sam before that, he was like a tuning fork who resonated to her as easily as Rahne. He'd smoke a bowl with her and they'd do it lazy and easy, laughing at their gawky limbs. But when they were "trying" it soured it, Rahne wolf-formed on the bed telling Dani through their link, "NOW NOW you're ovulating" and Sam having to jump to it. And Rahne shifting hopefully every day and sniffing her for the scent of it taking, or worse, going wrong. She got to batting Rahney's muzzle out of her crotch, feeling under siege. It didn't take, anyway.

Sam left after a year of it, after Rahne got so sharp with him his eyes got hot during an ordinary workout from some bitchy shit she said about his steering. He met the Russian girl during a fight and was married to her within two months.

They are mostly fine these last years, as fine as people in their line of work ever are. She counts them very lucky, looking at the others. Especially 'Berto. But some nights they aren't.

They go to the woods on those nights. They run for miles. They swim in water too cold for regular people, and bathe in moonlight, and maybe kill and eat something. And make love in the forest, like when they were teenagers who had to get out of range of the telepaths.

Some nights they go up to the rooms they've shared for a decade, like tonight, as familiar and as sustaining as bread and soup, and have the best kind of old-married people sex, the kind where knowledge is power.

Bad news, Rahne tells her afterwards. You'll be early again. It'll start during close-quarters combat Wednesday. Dani groans. She's always been irregular. She misses training in those funny uniforms with the straps and pockets. The pouches were so handy for tampons, ibuprofen, your pipe...

Rahne is no longer puritanical about Dani's drug use. She watches without wrinkling her nose while Dani cleans peyote with a scalpel, and she has come to like the smell of even the dankest weed. But she's still the only Scot in New York who hates whiskey. It smells like poison to her, even in her human form. She lies in their bed and watches Dani smoking, and she looks truly content with their life. If there's a shadow in her eyes, it could be from any of the losses they've suffered.

Dani's on the archery range the next morning when her comm beeps. "Danielle, it's all hands on deck." Scott tells her. "In the city, fight sites at Sheep's Meadow and Bowling Green. I need you to run our people. The crew from London is coming 'cause they have that guy with tectonics."

The London group...Sam. In the Blackbird everybody's looking at her and Rahne, 'til she snaps at them to get their heads in the game. They need to be ready for every fight. This might not be the worst fight, it's just one of Parker's grudge-holding oldschool moleman weirdoes who's always breaking out. Though it sounds like the mole guy talked some of his asshat squidhead cellies into joining him this time. And she gets migraines when she has to seriously use her powers these days. And...and she's tired of suiting up, tired of getting it done, tired of giving orders that get people killed. As the plane angles in over the island and the morning sun reflects off the new tower she catches Rahne blinking away tears.


	2. Food allergies.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dinner at the mansion.

A Quinjet dumps them back on the front lawn at dusk. Not caring about the way the landing gear fucks up the lawn. Not making sure someone's home to look after them. Granted there's still tons of damage control to be done back in the city, survivors to rescue, compromised buildings to shore up. But still, that guy is a dick. Those guys are all dicks.

Sam helps her to the door and she palms the security plate. Rahne is looking riled and exhausted, her hackles up and white showing around her eyes, her tail lashing. A deep cut on her shoulder is already closing, the fur moving in around it. They lurch through the door into the house together. Sam pulls his helmet off and Dani looks at him in the light of the front hall.

He looks exactly the same. He still looks like he cuts his own hair, blindfolded. He was six two at sixteen, and he hasn't ever put any weight on those long bones. "Chief", he says, his blue eyes meeting hers. She falls into in his arms, then vomits all over both of them. Rahne weaves nervously around their legs. "Easy, Chief. Let's get yuh washed up - warshed up - and get yuh some headache pills."

Haydache pills. His mom called them that. She got cancer and went before she was sixty. Dani has no idea how many grandkids there are now, how the rest of the brood is doing, if Paige finished bartending school. Admitting she doesn't know feels like reporting a stolen car. She used to know so much about Sam's family. "Ah got family enough for all three of us", he'd say. Rahne kept the class pictures on her mirror and had favorites among them, still talks to Jeb pretty often.

Sam’s London uniform - none of them have ever called them costumes - is made of some slippery polymer, and it's cool against Dani's hot face. He picks her up like he used to, and Rahne follows along as he carries her to the bathroom off the front hall. He puts her down and goes for the clasp at the back of her neck, trying to release the top of her suit. "They're new-- it's a new -- here, let me." Rahne has shifted back to human form, casually naked, and undogs the magnetic binder at Dani's collar.

She peels Dani's suit down over her shoulders and Sam grabs all the fancy little towels and starts sponging Dani gently with warm water. He seems oblivious to the vomit on his own shiny outfit. Rahne towels him off, the polymer unstained. "The bloody hell you're wearing?" "It's a new tech from some feller, makes suits with new tech. Hackney. Where's _your_ suit, girl?" "We had a bit of an unstable molecule unstabilizing, a while back. A forcefield and blaster thing. Streams were crossed. And we're not on such terms with Mr. Richards these days to just ask for new ones." "So you're just in your birthday suit when you shift back? What would th’ Rev say?" "Fucked if I care." "The Dubai scars are all gone." "Yeah, been gone years now." "You always were a good healer."

Dani sits on the toilet lid, topless, with her naked wife and their former lover ministering to her and each other. It's the best day she's had in years, despite the headache and the puking and the ruts in the lawn and the downtown property damage they'll catch hell for.

 

Sam stays for dinner, after the rest of the crew straggles in, the flyers bitching about an inversion layer of particulate debris over the city. The moleguy had some cellie who had some disintegration thing, turned two blocks of the High Line to dust. The trashed Blackbird, one wing partly dematerialized, is still in the middle of the Great Lawn. With their luck, someone will steal it and sell it to a hostile foreign power.

At dinner everything is awkward. Sam has "food allergies" now, apparently, and "doesn't do gluten". He used to eat mostly flour and lard, in highly-processed forms available at convenience stores. Moira tested him, he says, and he shouldn't have cornbread either, but that's too much to ask. Rahne stares at him like... well. Speaking of things you don't get to eat anymore.

Scott and Ororo bounce the conversational ball around gracefully, asking thoughtful questions about Sam's role in the London team and what kind of training facilities they have. Dani wants to fight Sam, then, suddenly. A good hand-to-hand or quarterstaff fight, like they used to have when she lost her powers, no mercy asked or given, with a sauna after.

She catches his eye as he goes on about logistics for a team with three flyers, recent battles. "You messed up that new convention center by the Eye pretty good." "Wasn't mah fault! How’m I s’posed to know it was such shit-ass construction? They had the _in_ surance." "Mmm. How's your hairpin turn these days?" "Better'n ever! I got this gimbal thing, s' why I wear m' helmet, like a phone y'know?" "Nice", she says, looking across at his cheekbones reddened by the day's sun (his blasting field makes him nigh invulnerable, but not to UV) and his lantern jaw. His face is like a warm blanket. He has never seemed either handsome or not handsome to her, just their Sam.

Rahne finds him terribly sexy, she's always loved his rangy shoulders, his flat stomach, his crinkly blue eyes, his drawl. He came to their bed when she was eighteen, precisely. Stick-in-the-mud, stickler for rules, still just like Scott that way. Sixteen had been close enough, for Dani. It had been hard enough to wait that long, with their psychic connection and Rahne's enhanced senses. There was no fooling the wolf, and the wolf knew what she wanted.

Rahne's eighteenth birthday, when no giant robots attacked the house, and there wasn't a breakout from any Pacific island supervillain supermax, and nobody sent an SOS about approaching alien warships from a satellite observatory. Just the three of them, all night, bare skin licked wet in a tangle of arms and legs, Sam drinking beer in cans and Rahne eating some kind of hideous organ meat sausage to keep her strength up.

Dani left them in bed and went for a ride at dawn. She needed alone time, and the sunrise was so beautiful. Brightwind rose up into the pink clouds of that hot summer morning, his huge wings gilded, and she sucked oxygen into her cells and sang old songs in the sky. After she rubbed him down and put him up in his paddock, she went to the kitchen and made an enormous plate of sandwiches. They were sleeping when she came in, the dim room so full of sex funk it was like they'd been running a fog machine of fucking.

Sam woke up at her footsteps and slid out from around Rahne. He sat with her on the floor and they ate like starveling creatures, not talking at all. Afterwards she leaned her head on his shoulder and dozed off. He was barely twenty, she was twenty-one. They'd been fighting side-by-side since she was seventeen.


	3. New Coke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Old-school mutant wisdom, by the pool.

After the awkward post-battle-reunion dinner she goes out onto the back terrace for a smoke and finds Logan sitting there, nursing a beer. "Hey." "Don't say it." "Wasn't gonna, Chief." Logan's the only other person who calls her that. It's pretty problematic, these days, but it's comforting nonetheless. "Need a light for that little spliff of yours?" She accepts his Zippo gratefully, fires up. "You look pretty peeved yourself." "Boy was needed here." "He hasn't been a boy for a while, and he made the best decision for all of us." "Sometimes the best decision is the one that looks like a disaster."  

He leaves her with that bit of oldschool mutant wisdom, but thumps her shoulder with his impossibly heavy hand as he heads back inside. There are fireflies, blinking in the dark, and the sound of frogs peeping. A cool breeze comes off the nearby lake. Dani lies back on a recliner, thinking that soon Sam will go leave to go back to London and she and Rahne will fight, or cry, or make love, and go to sleep.  

Breaking glass, the cherrybomb sound of Sam's blasting and a howling,  _howling_ wolf wake her up. They are tussling in mid-air above her, Rahne snapping and snarling. Sam's blast trail lights everything with a horrible lurid light. He dives like a fighter jet past Dani, grasping Rahne around her barrel, his forehead bleeding from a scratch. He yells, "YOU WERE RIGHT I HATE HER AND I'M MISERABLE!" at the furious wolf and dumps Rahne into the pool from a height of twenty feet. The splash soaks Dani from head to foot. Logan leans out the broken upstairs window and snorts. Another fun night at the School for Twisted Youngsters, as they used to call it. 

Sam lands beside her and helps her up from her recliner. He looks in her eyes. "You're too high for this shit, aren't you." "I'm pretty high." Rahne climbs out of the pool in her halfway form, looks over at them, shifts back to four-feet. "Gonna run, be back", she tells Dani through their link. And is off for the back forty, probably looking for an unlucky deer.  

Sam walks up to their room with her. "We cancelled muh flight. Gonna leave tomorrow." "Alright." She pulls dry clothes out of drawers, turns her back on him to change. He lies on their bed, looking exhausted. She lies down beside him and takes his hand.  

"Chief. I fuckin need you. I cain't do it without you. I never could." 

"Do you really hate her?" 

"No, a'course not. She's a fantastic woman, she's smart, an' strong, and a mad dog fighter. But speedsters. Speedsters'r fucked up." "Except for John-Paul." "Cept for John-Paul." 

He raises her hand to his mouth and kisses it. "Don't matter anyway. She ain't you and she ain't mah wolf." Dani buries her head in his shoulder, feels his arms go around her. She really is too high for this shit. She sings a little Joni Mitchell, then Sam's favorite Bonnie Raitt. 

When she wakes up Sam and Rahne are fucking on the rug. Not savagely, as they used to, but slowly, staring into each other's eyes. Rahne is sitting in his lap, rocking, and she's been crying, but she's smiling now. Her nostrils flare as she senses Dani waking up. She takes Sam's face in her hands, stretches up to kiss him gently. She levers herself off his lap, and gets in bed beside Dani. Sam stands up naked and hard, shining with Rahne's wetness, and Dani stretches out her hand to him.   

She pulls down her sweatpants and he lets his long body down over her. He sucks his fingers and reaches between them to ease her open. Rahne is holding Dani's hand, using her other hand between her own legs. Sam slides into her, bigger than most of their toys, the heat of him startling to Dani's body. It's been five years since she was with a man. He knows her, though; he knows exactly what she likes. He groans as he sinks into her. He moves slowly, softly. His eyes are hot. "Don't you cry now, Guthrie", she murmurs.  

He fucks her smoothly and sweetly, the one thing he could always do without any awkwardness. It’s like being on a train home. Rahne's orgasm builds and as ever it's contagious, even without their link they've always had a reciprocal thing. Dani arches her back, lets Sam in deeper, and he grabs Rahne's shoulder with one hand, grabs a fistful of Dani's hair with the other. He looks at their faces, and then closes his eyes as he comes inside her. She follows him, a still-sleepy dreamlike orgasm that leaves her weak. Moments later they're all out cold again, stuck together, someone's arm in an awkward position, someone mashed against the wall, as always. 

"We'd need a bigger bed. If you'd have me." 

They're up again, still a deep watch of the night. Dani watches them, half awake. Rahne bares her neck for him, abases herself. It's the wolf alpha/beta thing, the dominance game, that Rahne wants from her but Dani struggles to give. Sam is happy to be rough with the wolf. He throws her down and pins her by the wrists, and Rahne goes under, into that place of drowning supplication. Dani can almost hear the click. Sam mounts her, her body comically small yet startlingly ripe under him. "You want it, little wolf?" He asks her. "'Til I bleed", she whispers. He fucks her hard, mercilessly, her legs locked around him.  

Sam learned things in his years with Lila. She saw something in him, and she fed it. He has a bag of tricks that bely his country manner. He was fucking braces of intersex interstellar groupies in the green rooms of orbital roadhouses at eighteen, he was in a whole rock lifestyle. He claps a hand over Rahne's mouth and mutters, "Don't you howl, little wolf, or you'll wake the old folks." Dani lolls on the bed, admiring how Rahne's breasts are jolted by Sam's thrusts, how his butt looks as he pumps. Sam has stamina. He can fuck for hours, tirelessly. Dani often napped and woke up to them still doing it in the old days.  

Rahne makes little growls and whimpers, sounds that shade from human to puppy and back. Then deeper, like a full-grown dog. She shifts, the ozone smell shivering in the air, and flips Sam onto his back. She doesn't have secondary sex characteristics in her transitional form, and she's frighteningly strong in half-wolf. Shifts back to human enough to talk. "How. Could. You. Leave. Us." Her sharp teeth glitter from her retracted gums. "I'm VEXED at ye!" Sam looks up at the slavering werewolf, guileless. "Ah am so sorry." "what the bloody hell were you so afraid of?" "'Fraid to hurt you even more by stayin'." "I mean to make you pay. Dammit. It hurt so much." "Ok", Sam says, "alright, then. You show me, top dog." He rolls onto his belly, and Rahne is big and furry behind him.  

Dani hands her the harness and then she leaves them for this part. It's not that she objects to Rahne fucking Sam with their strap-on, or the various impact-related power exchange activities those two enjoy. It has in the past entertained her mightily. But she's gotten enough of the sharp edge of Rahne's hurt and frustration over the last five years.  

It's time for a nice pre-dawn walk in the woods, a little smoke, while those two work things out the way they always have, by fucking. Rahne can talk to Sam, for sure, or at least she used to, but there's something in her that believes women are the ones you share confidences with. She loves Sam, but she has never quite trusted him. Dani still trusts him with her life, like yesterday when she gave him the high sign and he swooped her out from under five thousand tons of falling concrete and rebar. She wasn't even scratched, unlike Rahne who ignored Dani’s orders and fought some lab-grown amphibian minion in a Tribeca sub-basement, trying to save a tourist. Which she did, of course. They're heroes, they do the thing. 


	4. Warm War.

The next day they go downstairs and eat everything in the kitchen, up hours after everyone else. Sam is flexible that way, a morning person who could stay out dancing with his nocturnal lovers all night. He gets right into it, never one to mince words and always ready to talk logistics. "I gotta go back t' the Smoke and talk to her. We...we been sleeping in separate rooms, at that house. 'S not gonna be a surprise, but she ain't gonna like it. Specially knowing it's about you two. She's Russian, y'know? She's gonna beat me up some, I expect. S'all right. Nobody ever kicks my ass like my five foot nuthin' wolf."  

His face breaks into his old smile, the smile he had before the miscarriages, the smile he had before all the bad battles happened, before everybody started dying. Rahne nods. "You go tell her, and we'll get a bigger bed." Dani drinks her orange juice and smiles. She put her hair in braids when she got dressed, for the first time in years. "I'll talk to Ororo about the combat rosters. You know we need another flyer bad, she'll be fucking psyched. You might haveta teach first year water aerobics, though." Sam makes a discreet gagging sound. 

After breakfast they all go down to the gym, as they've always called it. As if it was a basketball court smelling of floor wax and sweat socks, not the hollow belly of an alien apparatus with a mind of its own and more unused subprograms than Photoshop.  

They suit up together in the locker room, taking their usual spots, then all side-eye each other to see if it’s weird. It is weird, of course, but it’s also ok. Rahne has bite marks all over her neck and shoulders, already fading; Sam has rows of scratch marks on his back and is walking a little bow-legged. His helmet is pretty dorky. Dani wants to try a combat move she and Rahne have been working on, a little psychic-powers something that started as a play on Peter and Logan's thing. She asks Sam to hang out in the booth for the first pass at it.   

Rahne's transition generates energy (about a glowstick worth) and creates some weird radiation in the terahertz range. The Shi’ar instruments in the gym can detect it, and Dani is interested in combining it with her visions to create a kind of projectile, hard-light hologram. If they can get it to work, it might be pretty scary. With a lot of these dumb motherfuckers they deal with, scary is enough. And Dani is tired of violence, frankly. She waves at Sam up in the booth, then nods to Rahne. They stand at arms' length from each other on the war floor and Dani pulls an image from Rahne's mind. An old-school Sentinel, Rahne is supposed to be thinking of. The most generic threat they know. The first-gen Sentinels look like Model Ts to them now, comical, yet not ever really funny.  

The Sentinel shimmers and appears between them, lumbering down a European city street. Berlin, maybe? Has Rahne ever even  _been_  to Berlin? With Moira for a conference maybe? Dani looks at her partner, and Rahne looks freaked.  Something weird about this. The Sentinel in the vision turns, and turns faster. They’re all looking up at it now, it’s forty feet tall, as high as the Danger Room ceiling. Its hands are changing. Snake-like, writhing, its fingers have become tentacles. A small person appears at its feet, running. A crop of short blonde hair, a black jumpsuit – the figure blurs, like a speedster, but the robot tentacles lash out and snare it. “Lena??!!” Sam yells from the booth.  

Dani grabs Rahne and shakes her, and the vision disappears. “Baby? Baby? Are you ok?” Rahne is reeling, limp against Dani’s chest, murmuring. “We have t’ save them!” “Save who?? Who was that? What was that, baby? Where did it come from?”  

Sam comes running onto the floor, furious. “You got a fucking threat scenario with my WIFE?” He sees Rahne’s shock, ratchets down a little, glares at Dani.  "That wasn't kind, Chief.  _You_   gonna  take it  outta  my hide too?" “It’s not us!  Rahne  was supposed to give me a Mark 1, and then we throw it across the room, like throwing your voice?” “And it wasn’t  _her_.” Rahne looks up from Dani’s shoulder. “Sam. It wasnae Lena. It was someone young. And they need our help.” 

Rahne is badly unnerved, Sam is still pissed, and Dani has a headache coming on, so they get back into civvies and go upstairs to share the weirdness. Weirdness shared is weirdness halved, Kurt always says. Surely someone will know what’s going on.  

They do, and it isn’t good.  

“You can’t have one day of peace and quiet in this goddam house--” Logan is muttering over a screen. Everybody is trailing into the kitchen, looking at their phones, looking at their comm, looking inside their skulls at long-range telepathic projections from one of Emma’s girls who’s doing an exchange program in Charlottenburg. It  _is_ Berlin , how the hell Rahney knew, and Berlin has _problems_. Sentinel problems, five Model 9s, but with those fucked-up tentacle hands. Like that guy who Parker used to fight all the time. The Sentinels are on Potsdam heading north. They have these big LED displays on their chests and the displays all read “WHERE IS CHILD”. 

“See, we havetae help the wee mutant!” Rahne yelps. Never a dull moment.  

Obviously, they’re gonna go see what the deal is, and stop the octo-Sentinels, and save whoever needs saving, while causing as little infrastructure damage as possible. The plane is still on the Great Lawn, though. They’ll have to borrow a Quinjet to get to Berlin, and Dani is still mad at those guys. Good thing the _real_ adults are the ones doing the asking. Ororo pings the fancy city superfolk. 

Meanwhile Dani puts together a mission crew that allows for the damage control team in the city and leaves enough power on deck at home to manage any surprises. With Sentinels you really never know, a hundred more could come pouring through the Holland Tunnel like giant killer robot rats any minute. Trask or Gyrich or Bozo the Clown could have a stash of them under Riker’s Island for all she knows. 

Peter is good for this kind of thing, and can fly a Quinjet, and also he doesn’t talk too much. From Dani’s own cohort, the working hero pickings are thin. Shan and Illyana are halfway across the galaxy, and Empath...well. ‘Berto hates Sentinels, actually even more than everybody else, but he has really never resolved his impulse control problems, plus the tequila, so he’s benched. Also he’s wearing his bathrobe – excuse me, smoking jacket – at 2pm, so his bitching lacks credibility. Sam is still convinced it could have been Lena in the vision, and although she is fine and safe at the Tower Bridge HQ, he insists on coming. Rahne is obviously going. They have a fancy anti-Sentinel backpack torpedo gun thing Forge recently designed; he claims it's 99% guaranteed to work. Or 98%. They'll have to manage.

Right before Kurt starts porting them into the City to the Quinjet, Dani gets a call from Callisto. Callisto has a line on the situation, through some underground (ha ha) connection of hers. Apparently the Sentinels were stationed in a Cold War bunker near Tempelhof and have been activated and hacked by some kind of geek supervillain-for-hire. The guy is a Black-Hat shithead in a fancy Aeron chair, and it’s not clear who booked him for the job, but it’s looking government.  


	5. Pink Pussycat.

During the three hours they’re over the Atlantic (the Blackbird, with its Sh’iar upgrades, would have done it in one and a half), the Sentinels do not hurt anyone. Watching them walk calmly through Berlin is sickening, like watching sharks that aren’t hungry … yet.  It has to be admitted that the Quinjet has some fucking superior monitoring tech, thanks to being dialed into creepy Big Brother S.H.I.E.L.D. satellites and surveillance cameras all over the planet. The Sentinels are conducting a block-by-block, house-by-house search through an enormous part of West Berlin called Schöneberg. They look in the windows at each floor of each building, and show a picture on their chest screens. It looks like the small person in the jumpsuit, with the shock of blonde hair.   

The robot heads are level with the top floors of the mostly five-story buildings as they walk and their loudspeakers are booming, “Give us the child” on a dully threatening loop. This kind of thing doesn’t go over very well in Berlin, unsurprisingly, and repurposed school buses, ancient VW vans and bike brigades of furious anarchists are pouring into the West from squats in Kreuzberg 36. One group has made the Sentinels/mutant hunter connection and has hastily-scrawled signs that read “fick Speziesismus”. Rather than clearing the battle scene, young people with no defenses except molotov cocktails are flooding it. 

 Not good, but Callisto pings the Quinjet comm with another tip. “Go to the Pussycat Bar”. The WHAT?? “A dyke bar called the Pussycat. You’ll be right at home.” Callisto can be a bitch, still, sometimes.  

The kid’s name is Dix, Callisto has learned. The plan is to find the kid and then after they’re somewhere safe, put the Sentinels out of commission. Forge’s gun will probably work, right? They don’t have anybody with super-strength to haul away bricked robots the size of King Kong, so they’ll be leaving some debris, but maybe there’s someone local who can handle it. Or tow trucks, tow trucks are pretty good for that. 

Peter sets the Quinjet down neatly on the Platz der Luftbrücke. It has Earth’s best full-on stealth mode, so hopefully the Mark 9s don’t have the capacity to register it, but who ever knows in the shadow arms race of competing bullshit government agencies. And the city superfolk really think of the Sentinels as a problem for Xavier and his people, so it’s not like they were optimizing for giant robot non-detection. Anyway, they leave the invisible jet and get on the subway. This seems a little déclassé to Dani, but Peter insists. As a European, he points out that mass transit is efficient. Sam, who’s been living in Central London for years, concurs. Besides, Pete’s a damn big guy even in regular person mode, and the five of them won’t fit in a taxi. They don’t have any money, but it appears no one ever pays for the subway anyway. They have civvies over their suits, and no one gives them a second look. They get off the train at a place called Nollendorfplatz, and Dani sees a downward pointing triangle in pinkish quartz on the stone wall of the station. There are wreaths and flowers laid at its base. Some kind of memorial.  

They walk south a couple blocks through leather bars and coffeehouses. Dani does feel pretty much at home! The Pussycat has an old-fashioned speakeasy setup at its door, with a hatch that has a grating over it. Dani rings the doorbell, and after a long wait, the face of a middle-aged butch appears in it. “Geh Weg!” the doorkeeper mutters, and slams the hatch shut. Peter shouts through the door, “Wir sind hier, um Dix zu helfen!” The hatch opens again, and the butch treats them to an extremely sour glare. The door opens a crack. “Schnell, schnell!” They squeeze in and she surveys their group and gets enough of a queer vibe from Rahne and Dani that her expression softens slightly. “I will take you.” So she does speak English!  

The barkeep leads them through the darkest, smokiest smelling bar Dani has ever been in. It’s like Grassroots crossed with the Rawhide. At the back of the bar there is a door with a police lock, and they all trundle through it and down a set of cement stairs into a kind of crawlspace basement full of dusty bottles. Then through a crumbling gap in the concrete wall into another stairwell, and up into a courtyard littered with pieces of building. And, inexplicably, a sort of ramshackle pen containing two goats! Don’t they ever fix this city up? Parts of it look like Williamsburg after Sue Richards finally kicked Doom’s ass for good.  

They climb over the rubble, following the barkeep. On the far side of the courtyard, there’s a whole apartment building sort of hidden in the back pocket of the street. They go through a big fancy door, past twelve-foot-tall French doors letting on what appears to be a rococo ballroom, and into what looks like a very small, secret church. In the church a bunch of goth girls are playing Hearts on the floor, and a figure in a black jumpsuit is tilting the hell out of an old pinball machine. The goth girls leap up, scattering cards, and form a protective ring around the pinball player. The player turns around, making reassuring gestures at the flock of goths. 

“So, you finally made it. You took your time.” The kid is about twelve, non-binary, stocky. They’re wearing a vintage military flight suit with a zip front, cuffs rolled up, and hi-top, black and yellow Nike Dunks. Their skin is medium-toned, the blonde hair is bleach, and they have the same high Slavic cheekbones as Peter, and Sam’s soon-to-be-if-the-Sentinels-don’t-get-them-all ex-wife Lena. 

“Uh, sorry, our long-range teleporter is way, way out of town.” Dani snorts, taken aback. Some rescue! But Rahne rushes towards the kid, careful not to enter their physical space, and meets their eyes, asking, “Are you ok? Your name is Dix, right?” “Dix. I’m fine. But my powers say a giant robot is going to catch me and cut off my head in about six hours.” 


	6. Sisters of Mercy

After that sassy opener, they sit down on the two pews of the tiny church and start trying to get a handle on the situation. The clutch of goth girls eyes them suspiciously, but starts up a new card game. Dix explains about recently manifesting powers as a speedster, and getting a little bit unstuck in time.  

“My powers showed up during a show in Prague-” Dix waves at the goth girls- “me and my friends were at this club and the strobe light went on, and I...um. Started flickering in and out? On and off? To the beat?”  One of the goths looks up, speaks in Russian-accented English. “They were there, then gone, then back, like the light was switching them on and off.” Dix nods, and says, “Each time I flickered out, I was actually... seeing the whole club? Like I was moving around it really, really fast, like a camera on a dolly but the film was sped up.” The goth girl chimes in again. “It went on for about one minute, we were all crazy trying to get close and find out what was the deal, but the dance floor was very crowded. When the beat dropped, Dix flashed again but didn’t come back. It was very frightening. We waited til the club closed, at 6 a.m. Then we decided to go where we always go, to the kebab shop around the corner, and wait.” 

“I was racing around the club for what felt like just a couple minutes, but I finally figured out how to brake myself and it was suddenly all dark and empty. I climbed out a window and went to get a kebab cause I was starving, and my crew was there.” “Dix was so hungry! We got them like six orders of frites!”, the Russian goth adds. “Then we went to our squat and started contacting people who knew about mutants for help.” 

What a mercy, Dani thinks. How beautiful, to go straight into the arms of your crew and be fed French fries, on the day your powers manifest. What would it have been like, if any of her own crew could have looked up “first powers manifestation” or “Mutant Drop-In Shelter” on a handy computer. What moments of terror Rahne might have been spared. She reaches out and squeezes Rahne’s hand, even though they’re on a mission. They’re in civvies anyway, and besides, this doesn’t really seem like a place where anybody is getting judged.  

Dix explains, with occasional comments from the girls, that they started meeting up with some supportive people at a crustpunk 3D printing collective near their place in Prague. Dix learned how to start and stop speeding. But most times they used their powers, they lost or gained some time, and sometimes saw things that hadn’t happened yet, like this year’s WGT. “This year’s what?” Dani asks. “Wave Gotik Treffen. Music festival.” Sam explains, which gets him a look of not-contempt from the card players. Sam smiles, then asks Dix in his softest drawl, “Where were yuh parents, durin’ this?” Dix flickers slightly, like a dying fluorescent bulb. “Single mom. She got TB. I left Ulaanbaatar last Fall, after, and came to Prague.” 

“I’m so sorry”, Rahne murmurs. Dix looks at her and scowls. “What could any of you possibly understand about something like that?” Every single one of the X-folx manages to hold their tongue, and remember that to kids the world is happening for the very first time. Rahne looks at Dix with her soft blue eyes. Dix shrugs. “I’m alright. I met my friends. I started staying at the squat. I got gigs helping with sound at clubs. Then, surprise, I’m a mutant! Random.” Dix looks away. “My mom would’ve thought it was neat. She was punk as fuck.”  

An older, tiny, pink-haired goth gets up and gets a bottle of water from a cooler, and hands it to Dix, and Dix cracks it and goes on. “Last week we came to Berlin. We heard there were some people who could help with my powers, plus we’re going to Leipzig for WGT soon anyway. Yesterday I was using my powers to collect a bunch of bottles for the refund, and I flashed up the stream to today. To this afternoon. I was in my body but it was on the ground, and you -” Dix looks at Rahne - “you were there, and one of those giant killer robots was about to kill us. Then I was back in my present body, in our crash space here.” 

Dani’s heart lurches. How the hell do they get involved in these things? Well, besides the whole mission statement about helping young mutants. She has enough experience with time weirdness to know this doesn’t actually mean a Sentinel is going to kill Rahne and the kid, but still, fuck.    
   
“I guess my biodad had some kinda google search and I popped on his radar or whatever. He’s some Chinese bureaucrat, and probably all down with their creepy genetics tracking. He used to be cool, I guess. I never met him. Now he hired some dingleberry to hack those robots to kill me.”  

Ok, that’s the situation in a nutshell. Dani proposes a plan. “Dix, you know a little about us. You might have heard our place helps young mutants. It’s basically our thing. We’d like to take you to the States and teach you how to use your powers. You’ll be safe.” 

Dix looks at Dani in total disgust. “The States? Do you EVEN still have clubs there? Just smash the robots and go home.” 

“Dix,” Rahne says gently, “We’ve been smashin’ these robots our whole lives. It doesna usually resolve the problem.” 

The Russian goth girl gets up from the card game and sits by Dix. “Dix. You are currently winding up in next week by accident half of the time you speed. It is weird, and also you eat like ten doners a day. We are spending most of Ariella’s camming money feeding you. It’s not that we mind, it is that it perhaps means things are weird with your body. These people are the gold standard for young-mutants-sorting-their-shit. I have read the wiki page.”  

Dix scowls. “It’s WGT in two weeks! Who’s gonna do your sound mixing for the show? What about the connect with the club in P’Berg? He said I could spin on Tuesday!” The goth looks very solemn, which isn’t hard given her personal style, and says simply, “Dix. You are our family. Put your own oxygen mask on first.” 

Dix looks frustrated, pissed and scared. “Will you at least smash the robots?” 

Dani smiles. “Kiddo, smashing those robots is our  _jam_.” 


	7. Golgotha

As Dix talks softly with their goth crew, and scoops bits of sound gear, a stuffed unicorn, and lots of black leggings into a backpack, Dani talks to the team about the exfiltration strategy. Her phone has a new message from Callisto. Callisto has located the evil hacker’s lair, near where they left the jet, in an underground bunker. That seems a little on-the-nose to Dani, but as Peter points out, bunkers are like 7-11s in Berlin.

In the interest of less people killed, Dani gels a plan involving stealth before smashing. Someone will go to the hacker’s place and gently “encourage” him to turn off the Sentinels. Callisto says the bunker is booby-trapped, with some kind of physical explosives. That means someone physically hardened, Peter, or Sam, blasting. Blasting underground is not great, so it’s Peter. Meanwhile Dani, Rahne, Sam and Dix will head low profile towards the jet, awaiting the all-clear from Pete. Dix hugs their friends goodbye, and shrugs their backpack on. Their scruffy pale-blond head is held high as the five mutants hit the street. It’s about three a.m., but there are very few people around – the giant robots have spooked people into their homes citywide. The subway is closed for the night, so Dix indicates the bus stop with jaundiced eyes. “Since you don’t have enough flyers for all of us... or, like, jetpacks or feet rockets --” A nearly empty bus rolls up and they get on, not paying.

As soon as they’re all sitting down, Sam, master of the didactic, starts explaining. “Dix, stuff like jetpacks, it's _reg-u- lated_. The government aint never on our side, and don’t dig us havin’ more power that we already got. We’re goddam lucky a few fancy planes was grandfathered in.” “And what about the old blue guy, the teleporter?” “That _partic’lr_ blue guy, he spent the last-” Sam checks his watch-”36 hours portin’ from the Department of Buildins Collection at NYC Mu-nicipal Archives to basements and sub-basements where people’re trapped, rescuin’ people. While the meantime 4chan dickbags dox every woman he ever dated on mutielover.com. When he took a break to put us on our plane, which we hadda borrow from folks we’re _conflicte_ d about, he’d saved 47 civilian lives.” Dix looks deeply disappointed. “So being an out mutant superhero basically sucks?” “Yeah. But just like everbody, we got each other and we got the beat. Speakin’ of, didn’t Bowie and Iggy Pop usedta live around here?”

Dix and Sam immediately drop into music-talk, and Dani seizes the opportunity to whisper in Rahne’s ear. “How are you doing, love? This is a weird one.” “I’m in the zone, for now. Freak out later I guess.” Dani sighs and squeezes her close. All of them can switch into hyperfunctionality in a crisis, at varying emotional cost. Sure, the telepaths work on whoever’s willing, as they can, but the only cure for c-PTSD is still a time machine. Dani looks out over the deserted streets, seeing beers and doners abandoned at the outdoor tables of late-night cafes. Klieg lights pulled from nightclubs rake the sky a few blocks away, the loudspeakers of protest groups thrum faintly, and robot eyeball searchbeams illuminate the Sentinel’s path, which is roughly parallel to their own. There are scattered screams, but no sounds of destruction. “This is me”, Peter says, jolting her, and gives her a brisk nod as he gets off the bus. “Good hunting!” she calls after. Peter has been busting bunkers forever, he’ll be fine. His Soviet upbringing also gives him a useful attitude about enhanced interrogation and physical persuasion.

“She’s your wife?” Dix asks Rahne, indicating Dani with their chin. “Aye, and my heart.” “But you bang him too?” Glancing over at Sam. Rahne sputters, blushes, and grows fur on her face. “That’s cool,” Dix says. “That’s relatively modern.” Dani sighs, imagining teaching archery to this brat. It’s true kids have complained about the suburban nature of the X-setup in the past, and Salem Center is not exactly hopping. But the house is safe, whenever it’s not blown up, and there’s a good gym. Rahne recovers, says, “Ye’re a bit young for such talk, no?” “I’m almost twelve. I’m not interested in your gross sex stuff, I just wanna know you have contemporary values!” Dix looks out the window and stands up. “We can cut through the park here.” They get off the bus, the bus driver continuing to completely ignore them, and set off towards the Platz at a jog, all their hoods pulled up. The protesters are louder, and they can hear the Sentinels’ feet land, which sounds like somebody dropping a jeep from a helicopter over and over. The drone of “Give us child” is audible. Drug dealers at the end of the park glance at them, then away. The X-babies grew up pretty tough-looking.

Dani’s phone chirps. They pause in the shadow of a biergarten named Golgotha, and Dani puts Peter on speaker. “I have good news and bad news”, Peter says. “Which news do you want first?” “Christ, Peter.” “I have located the hacker, but he is in the deepest K-Hole I have ever seen.” “He’s in a what?!?” “A K-Hole. He is wasted. Extremely high. Too high to communicate with. You know, Danielle, we are allowed to leave Westchester, even without a mission. There is an entire twenty-first century waiting for you.” Sam laughs, which irks both Rahne and Dani. Staying home with your spouse is relaxing! It’s nice to chill, in their line of work. Sure, maybe they’ve gone a little overboard with the nesting the last few years, so what? Rahne’s knitting is very creative and Dani finally learned to cook! She makes really good pancakes, even.

“Whatever, Peter. So what kind of bullshit villain activates killer robots and then clocks out to catch a sweet buzz?” “He is not a conventional villain, Dani; he is a software programmer without a moral compass, like Mark Zuckerberg.” “Fine. Draw a dick on his forehead, smash all his hard drives and meet us at the waterfalls in the park”.

It sucks, because really, as much as they hate them, the Sentinels are just programmed things that need to be re-programmed. If only they still had Doug.

But Doug was gone before his seventeenth birthday, his bed empty the morning after a mixer where they all heard Empath casually say “the gay alien robot couple, you know.” Doug always handled everything so well, ever since that first night. Until the night he didn’t. Until things got too weird for Doug, or he finally understood how weird they’d been all along. He Could. Not. Hang. He enrolled at Loyola and declared his vocation within a year, and none of them have heard a word from him since.

‘Lock was broken hearted, literally dissolving in his grief. He was a pool of glinting circuits and rust, a hissing mess of wires and ham radio signal, lurking by the telephone pole on Greymalkin Lane like a feral cyborg raccoon. It was Kitty who saved him, naturally, fucking around on NSFNET, finding some shady AI research that offered a protocol for distributed electronic consciousness. They uploaded ‘Lock to a series of satellites and he went walkabout in space with Voyager 2 for a few years, until he felt like being near humans again. These days he mostly runs in the deepsea cables, sparking and glowing in the land of hagfish and bioluminescense. He talks to whales. They can reach him, of course, but it will take a while.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was entirely inspired by a tag, "Sam Dani and Rahne for the win" on a story by OriginalCeeNote. The idea had absolutely never occurred to me, in the 80s when I was drawing Rahne/Dani slash, even though I was poly and bi. I didn't read the story because as soon as I saw the tag I started writing!  
> Title courtesy of NotQuiteHydePark.


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